Literary Skinnydipping, Casual Sex Books and Getting Some in Venice ParkNov 15 '02 Write an essay on this topic.The Bottom Line Can you believe the director of Y Tu Mama Tambien is tackling the third Harry Potter film adaptation? What is reading to me? Good question. I'm glad I asked it. Well, I was watching this foreign film last night called Y Tu Mama Tambien. That's Spanish, and it translates roughly as "And Your Mother, Too." And I'm aware that most people find foreign films about as fun as getting one's teeth pulled by the dentist in Little Shop of Horrors, when he's suffering from a bad case of the Monday mopes, but bear with me. Y Tu Mama Tambien is about sexual discovery. That phrase, actually, has always struck me as odd. One can imagine Madame Curie fiddling around in her husband's lab one late night and suddenly going, "Jiminey Cricket! I've discovered orgasms." Or Chris Columbus going back to King Ferdinand and Queen Elizabeth, virtually popping with good news. "Well, your Majesties. I know I promised you a swifter route to the Indies, but I've found something better. Much, much better." Anyway, the basic plot is that two teens, Julio and Tenoch, convince a very lovely, older woman, Luisa, to accompany them to a beach called "Heaven's Mouth." They travel and they have misadventures, and travel some more. They sleep with their feet on the dashboard, freebase, take turns knocking boots in the back seat, and throw their Big Mac wrappers on the floor. Then they arrive, and this place, Heaven's Mouth, it makes the Cast Away island look like an a-bomb testing ground. The teens, and Luisa, they swim around in the nude. They're wonderfully unashamed of their bodies. Americans on a barren, paradisical beach, stripped to their birthday suits, would be jumpy as anything. "That jellyfish is leering at my special places!" Not so with our intrepid, unabashed skinny-dippers. A local fisherman shows up with his family. They motor around in his boat, play soccer on the beach, get plootered and make wild, sexual confessions. "You had sex with my mom? No way! I had sex with yours." Typical Kodak moments. And I think it's right about then that the narrator tells the viewers that in a year, this kindly fisherman and his family will be forced to leave this beach, to make way for a resort. He will look for work everywhere, eventually returning to Heaven's Mouth to work as a janitor. That's pretty much how a lot of people see reading. And I'd like to fool myself into thinking that's why a lot of people don't read. Because they know one day they'll reach the end of the book, and they'll have to pack up the picnic hamper, take down the tent, and leave this wonderful beach. They'll come back for a second read, and the beach is still there, but it's just not the same. That soccer-playing, life-loving fisherman is now a janitor in some ritzy tourist trap. But that's the wrong way to go about it, I feel. I think of reading like Before Sunrise. In this movie, two people - a self-described "ignorant, dumb" American, and a French girl - decide to get off a train and spend one night wandering around in Venice, discussing life, love, the pursuit of yappiness. I mean, I've heard of shooting the breeze, but these people take the breeze down a dark alley and execute it ala the Bonnie & Clyde death scene. Their night culminates with a bit of public park porking. I can just imagine the guy thinking to himself, "I knew if I got her to talk long enough, she'd get light-headed and be unable to resist me. Ha, ha!" In the morning, these two, most likely they'll never see each other again. But what a night: gypsy fortune-tellers, canal-side poets, plays with talking cows. That's the attitude I think people should have toward reading. And I'm not talking about those stodgy, Miltonesque books. Those books, it's like going to the funeral of a friend's great-aunt. You feel you should be serious, but the whole thing doesn't mean that much to you, because you're outside of the proceedings. The books I'm talking about are those jokey, frivolous-fun, Michael Chabonish books. In the end, I guess it doesn't matter whether you're a Before Sunrise reader, or a Y Tu Mama Tambien reader. Either way, I suppose, you get laid.  |
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